


Sibling Rivalry

by KittyburgerMN



Category: Mecha - Fandom, Mekton, Original Work, Role-Playing Games
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-28 03:42:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/669878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyburgerMN/pseuds/KittyburgerMN
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Siblings on the opposite side of a global civil war find themselves together in a city under attack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sibling Rivalry

**Sibling Rivalry**

Salzburg in July is beautiful. It’s cool enough to be pleasant without requiring a jacket. I had a month left on my medical leave, and I wanted to see the sights of Europe before the war swallowed me whole again. A fair in the city center, however, was not what I anticipated – I’d barely learned the layout of the city to begin with, and this threatened to upend my poor sense of direction. The stalls, at least, promised a few things that were fun, even if the bazaar itself would mean that my GPS, unreliable to begin with, wasn’t going to get me where I was going any time soon. With my thumb, I turned off my bike and left the helmet strapped to the seat. Besides the motorcycle – it’s pretty much the only way to get around European cities that doesn’t involve your own two very tired feet – my look was definitely more of a Plain Jane than Jane Dean, so to speak. My tight t-shirt was stretched over a stomach that spoke of an endless series of crunches, but my arms looked deceptively like I hadn’t lifted anything heavier than a ream of paper or the 1.5 kilo barbells that were sitting in my apartment, in my life. Black leather riding boots encased bare, pale legs and I was wearing a close-fitting denim miniskirt. I kind of liked what I saw.

 

I didn’t like _this_ part of what I saw, though. My brother. How the hell was he here? I hadn’t given my itinerary to _anyone_ – the point here was to disappear for a few weeks. His blonde goatee was unmistakable, as was the fact that his ragged haircut violated considerable airspace above his head. My asshole brother wore his military fatigues like casual clothes, like _civilian_ clothes. I turned and hoped my dyed-blue hair would throw him off the trail, but nope. That sibling sixth sense was working the same as usual. We were in a neutral city – which didn’t mean a damn thing if Allied intel could pick me up the second I left. “Hey, Ma- um, Sophie!” he said. I groaned.

 

I ran my fingers over my denim miniskirt. It was barely decent anyway, I’d be damned if I let my own brother see what color my panties were. Success, my ride hadn’t caused it to ride up any. “Hi, Jake.” I felt a little bit of shakiness as I picked up my gyro from the cart I’d ordered at. The lamb was seared on a charcoal fire, and it was rich and smoky and savory. It distracted me from Jake being an asshole.

 

“What, isn’t our meeting a happy accident?”

 

“Brother, in this war, nothing’s an accident and very little is happy,” I said around a mouthful of lamb. I swallowed, peeled back the foil on my gyro and took another bite.

 

“That’d be true even if you hadn’t chosen a side opposite most of your family.” Point for Jake. I looked away and ran my fingers through my hair.

 

“I did what I _had_ to,” I said. My brother knew that the Alliance military didn’t exactly take well to transitions like mine, and staying on that side of the fence meant putting off living as my real self, maybe forever. “ _You_ don’t have to live with the memories of Mom taking a picture of you dressed up and blackmailing you with it to get you to change.”

 

My brother looked at my bike, changing the subject abruptly. “You went on vacation and brought your mechabike with you?” The _Tornado_ -class mechabike is a good one. The front and rear fairings come together to form the cockpit. The wheel cover panniers become legs and arms. A multi-purpose beam blaster is mounted on each wrist, with an eight-round micro-missile launcher just behind it. The whole thing happens in three seconds.

 

And my brother found this easier to believe in than the fact that his former “brother” is a woman. He tried to grab me the way he used to when we were kids. I pushed him off like any other unwelcome guy – the layer of subcutaneous fat that estrogen encourages to stick around meant I was stronger than I looked.

 

“Come home, Max.” The worst part was that for all that my old name stabbed me in the gut, I felt the sincerity coming off of him in waves. He wanted me to come back to the other side. He grabbed my wrist. Strong side, so that a forward spin would pull me toward him.

 

“That’s not my name, and you know it.” I whirl away from him, my gyro tumbling to the ground as I unsnap the top of my purse and reach inside of it.

 

“The hell it isn’t!” he shouted. Suddenly he was no longer my brother – instead, he was a man who used his size and strength to try to get his way, and I calmly leveled my service pistol at him. People were backing away fast. Pulling a gun in a European city was a good way to get really, really bad attention, even if your brother is trying to kidnap you. I could see the conflict in my brother’s eyes – he knew that I’d never been comfortable in a male guise – but I was also on the other side of a nasty civil war. It wouldn’t do me or him any good, and I hated having him at gunpoint, but if it was the only way to get away, I’d only feel sorry for the civilians caught in the crossfire. A few strides to my _Tornado_ and I could be gone before he could call down the Alliance on me.

 

Just then, the explosions happened. A missile hit less than a hundred metres from us, washing us with a blast of scorching wind. The attack was almost a relief, except for the people running and screaming around us.

 

“You’re responsible for this!” he shouted. I straddled my _Tornado_ and thumbed the fusion ignition to life again, settling the helmet onto my head. It transformed, folding me into a three-meter tall robotic infantrywoman – not that the _woman_ part was obvious to the observer.

 

“Like hell I am, Jake!” I didn’t have time for my brother’s shit, so I thumbed my rocket boosters and climbed up to rooftop level. A red light indicated an incoming missile just in time to shoot it down with my suit’s anti-missile minigun. Three barrels, no waiting. The spilling rocket fuel of the missile started fires in the streets.

 

The HUD lit up on the inside of the plexi panel in front of me. I could see everything in the street, the people running for cover. I willed them to get to safety before the real fighting started. With giant robots flinging explosives around, however, what exactly _was_ “safety”? I wanted to end this fight  quickly. A woman sprawled dead, her blood staining a ripped awning.

 

The Alliance and the Independents aren’t the only factions fighting this war. There’s the Decons – the Deconstructivist State Annihilation Party – who might say they want a just world, but in practice they’re just using it as an excuse to spread mayhem, or… whatever, I don’t know. What I did know was that the Decons were dangerous, and there was a Decon _Tatar_ battloid a kilometer away. Its head-mounted cannon fired a 120mm rocket at me, and it had a machine gun on each arm. Its thick armor made it a veritable walking tank and its broad, heavy feet made it hard to knock down. It was also hard as hell for a _Tornado_ pilot to take out on her own.

 

Jake’s _Sentinel_ mechabike was suddenly floating next to me. “What the hell are you doing, Jake!?” I ask. “I thought you believed I was a terrorist!” The _Sentinel_ was a near-match for the _Tornado_. Its chainsword was a little less versatile than the _Tornado_ ’s beam katar, but it had a better gun: a 15mm Mauser revolver cannon with 200 rounds, automatically parceling them out at 10 rounds per trigger pull when set to burst fire.

 

“There’s no way in hell I’m letting this thing take you out,” he said. “Let’s take it together.”

 

I floated away from him, gloating for a moment, but that moment cost me. The _Tatar_ fired another shell, almost spearing my cockpit. Red lights sprang through the entire left side of the battloid, the momentum of the shell spun me around and my hearing started ringing. Things came back to yellow as aux sensors clicked on, thankfully nothing was too badly broken. The _Tatar_ would eat us both for lunch if we let it, so I ducked back down behind a building to nurse my damaged actuators, while Jake tried to attack it with his revolver cannon.

_Classic big brother behavior_ , I thought, as Jake started flying to distract the _Tatar_. He was doing a half-decent job of it, too – the battloid was focused on him and finding it difficult to track me in any way.

 

A rattle of small-arms fire struck the sides of my _Tornado_. I should have known that the Decons wouldn’t send _only_ a _Tatar_. That would have been too easy. There had to be a plan for this attack. I swung my right arm out, using my target scanners to tag the enemies. Six micro-missiles took out a dozen, but in the meantime, they’d knocked two of my sensors offline.

 

Jake was having a rough time with the _Tatar_. I wasn’t surprised – it was a hard customer for a squad of mechabikes, not just one. We’d have to make do with a pair, one moderately damaged. My front fairing had seen better days, and the arms were in trouble.

 

Jake was a stubborn asshole, but he was my _brother_. I saw him go toe to toe with the bastard and his _Sentinel_ got smashed into a building for his trouble. I checked my own reserves – ten micro-missiles, both beam guns, eighty seconds’ flight time of fuel remaining… _no fear_.

 

The _Tatar_ crew had clearly gotten target fixation, because I got into range before they even knew I was there. Shouting, “ _Nobody hurts my brother but me,_ ” I switched one of the beam guns into katar mode, slammed it through the head into the vulnerable cannon elevation joint, and no more 120mm cannon; the chamber exploded with such force that I knew there had been a rocket round in it. The explosion shorted out my left-hand beam gun and probably didn’t do good things to the actuator, either. It also killed the gunner and commander in the head, and the suit staggered and nearly fell. Even with my damage, though, that evened out the odds considerably – without the big gun, the _Tatar_ had more armor but less firepower than a mechabike.

_That doesn’t mean you can relax!_ I rocket-jumped off of the head just before the mecha’s machine gun hand could close around my _Tornado_ ’s ankle. The pilot and engineer in the torso cockpit had to have seen everything in the head wink out and realize that there was somebody up top _causing_ that damage.

 

I picked up Jake’s _Sentinel_ and checked his vital readouts. They were ok. Heart rate elevated, respiration and perspiration too. But he wasn’t hyperventilating, and his suit was moving purposefully, not randomly, when I grabbed its hand and hauled it to its feet. “Still there, bro?” I asked.

 

“Still ready to kick some ass… _sis_ ,” he replied. I could save my exultation for later; our sibling-bonding moment was being interrupted by machine gun fire. The _Tatar_ was missing, though – I could see the pilot squinting through the slit window, and I guessed I’d taken out all of its sensors when I blew the head. Besides the squint, he was a pale, sweating teenager, fear and pain written on his face. I wondered if I wore the same expression. The head still belched smoke from the explosion.

 

“Sophie, he’s probably wounded in there. Maybe dying. Those things don’t have good compartment division – when you blew the head it probably sent a spray of shrapnel into the torso. But that won’t do any good if he kills us before he goes down.”

 

“You’re right, Jake,” I said, “so what do we do?”

 

“He’s got us outgunned. Neither of our suits can penetrate his armor frontally, either. But he’s down half his crew, scared, and hurt, probably badly. If one of us can get behind him, we can probably finish him off in one hit.”

 

I nod. “I’ll take his attention. You get him.”

 

“Like hell, Sophie! Your bike’s held together with wire and hope – one direct hit or even a near-graze and it’s over for you. _I’ll_ take his attention.”

 

“And yours by a prayer and the good intentions of the lowest bidder. You’re such a man, Jake.”

 

“And you’re a girl. Your point?”

 

“None whatsoever. I just wanted to hear you say it.” I shifted my bike back into motorcycle mode. Looking at the damage from a rider’s vantage point, I saw how right Jake was. The bike is badly damaged – I’d have to take it to a mechanic later on. But that was for after we survived the fight.

 

I kicked the fusion engine up to high. The tires were in perfect shape and the bike kicked up to 120 km/h in no time flat. The pilot of the _Tatar_ tried to turn to keep up with my movement, but I noticed how he was slowing down – probably a wounded arm. I kept ahead of his attempt to lead me with a machine gun, and then Jake was there, grabbing his attention with his revolver cannon. The characteristic chatter of the machine gun was retorted to with a staccato high-pitched, loud buzz of rounds firing so fast that you couldn’t tell one shot from the next. The way Jake was using it, he’d be Winchester in under a minute, so I had to act fast.

 

The air was full of a burning reek as I switched back to Battloid mode. My left arm was now in the red – I figured I was looking at creeping damage in the transformation mechanism. The internal oxygen system fed fresh, relatively odor-free air to my helmet, clearing my head instantly. Favoring the left arm, I lifted the right and snapped off the last two missiles on that side. They missed wide and my heart sank.

 

The _Tatar_ swiveled back to glare at me, lifting its left arm – the right must have been out of ammunition. Out of weapons on the right side, I had to take a risk. Trusting the damaged left-side servos not to go out on me, I triggered the unspent missile box on the left forearm. All eight missiles bloomed from the arm. Fire bloomed from the center of the _Tatar_ ’s palm.

 

The status indicators on my left arm went black, and the arm detached and crashed to the pavement as the _Tatar_ ’s machine gun hit a major junction.

 

Three of my missiles hit the _Tatar_. The remaining ones went wide, most into the air, one into the street just a few yards in front of the _Tatar_.

 

Two detonated harmlessly against thick armor, but the last struck where I was hoping it would, an intense plasma jet instantly incinerated the pilot and engineer, and the mecha slumped to the ground, as dead as any infantryman who had taken a direct hit to the eye.

 

My _Tornado_ went into emergency shutdown to protect its systems from further damage. It shifted back into motorcycle mode, dumping me unceremoniously into the street.

 

The _Polizei_ were there moments later, saw me leaning against my badly-damaged mechabike, saw Jake’s _Sentinel_ touch down next to me. The speed they drew their small arms with was impressive. I didn’t have the energy or the desire to draw mine. My bones felt weary.

 

“Don’t,” I said, taking my helmet off, “Just don’t. I know there are laws against mecha fighting in your city. I would hope you’d find it in yourselves to waive the penalties for self-defense?” The plastic made a loud thump as it hit the stone pavement. Jake dismounted, helmet already in hand.

 

The lead officer, a lean, white-haired man with kind blue eyes in a face like a well-worn leather wallet, looked at Jake, then he looked at me. In softly accented English he said, “We’ll stand down. I trust you’ll do no more fighting.”

 

I laughed painfully. “What with? My bike’s trashed.” I hated that part. To get it fixed I’d probably have to call the nearest Independence base and that would be the end of my leave.

 

“You protected us. I think we can find a way to get your motorcycle back on the road in a day or two.”

 

I grinned. “That would be perfect, sir. Thank you for your kindness.”

 

“It is not kindness that motivates my actions, _mein Dame,_ but gratitude. That _Tatar_ would have destroyed most of the city before we could put it down.” The howling sirens of firefighters made me wonder how much less damage we had done than the Tatar could, but I wanted to believe in the man’s gratitude, so I did.

 

I nodded. “Thank you.”

 

Jake dismounted his _Sentinel_ , back in bike mode. “I don’t know how you did it, Sophie. But that was a hell of a thing.”

 

I smiled. “You haven’t called me by my old name since the fight started.”

 

“Maybe our old man didn’t quite have everything figured out about us,” said my brother.

 

“You finally figured that out at 28,” I said. My hair fluttered in sweat-bound ribbons in the cool breeze.

 

He gave a painful smile. “Maybe I should have figured it out sooner. But better now than never.”

 

“I know,” I said. “Sometimes things change, and you can’t accept what you were raised with anymore.”

 

Jake hugged me.

 

“Take care of yourself, Sophie.”

 

“I will. Say hi to Dad.”


End file.
